About the Workshop

Printmaking with Solarplate is a simple approach and safer alternative to traditional etching and relief printing. Solarplate is a prepared, light-sensitive polymer surface on a steel backing for artists to produce fine prints. Since Dan Welden's development of the process in the 1970s, printmakers, painters, photographers, and art teachers interested in multiple impressions have found printmaking with Solarplates an exciting adventure. All one needs is inspiration, a graphic image created on a transparent film (acetate or glass), sun or UV light, and ordinary tap water, and the process is ready to begin. Both positives and negatives can be utilized; intaglio and relief printing techniques can be applied.

In this two-day workshop, participants will learn how to prepare and expose images, develop Solarplates, and print your prepared plates with an etching press.

Lunch is not provided. You can bring your lunch and eat it in the studio's garden courtyard or pop out to one of the local eateries in the Whiteaker neighborhood. The workshop will be held in the main WhitPrint studio.

About the Instructor

Barbara Mason is a lifelong artist/printmaker working in her own printmaking studio in Aloha, 15 miles west of Portland, Oregon. She has been an enthusiast of Solarplate techniques since 2001 and has taught the process in workshops since 2002 at local schools for Print Arts Northwest. She also teaches classes at Atelier Meridian. Dan Welden, the founder and developer of Solarplate, describes Barbara as an expert in the Solarplate technique and an enthusiastic, giving teacher who shares her knowledge unconditionally. Barbara believes that anyone can make art and everyone should be doing so.

Barbara has shown her work nationally and internationally for the last 25 years; her works are in the collections of the Portland Art Museum, Intel Corporation, Crow’s Shadow Art Institute, the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Kansas, the New York Public Library Collection, the Halle Ford Museum, the National Museum of Kampala Uganda, the Applied Sciences University of Amman, Jordan, the Jordon Schnitzer Collection, the American Print Alliance Memorial Collection and numerous private individuals and corporations.

Reserving Your Spot

Register and pay in full to reserve your spot in the workshop. To cancel a workshop enrollment, please email studio@whitprint.com. You'll get a full refund if your request is received at least 10 days before the start of the workshop, or a 50% refund if it is received at least 3 days before the start.